Anduril and Meta Make Peace to Make War Together - EP 18 Palmer Luckey

**Ashlee Vance** (0:00)
I got like a soundboard.

**Palmer Luckey** (0:02)
Oh yeah, that's great. You ever seen all the old Major League gaming style videos people do?

**Ashlee Vance** (0:12)
Like from the video game?

**Palmer Luckey** (0:15)
No, there was all the old MLG. I'll show you afterwards. I'll show you afterwards. But air horns are a staple of that entire genre of video.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:25)
I was excited to have the soundboard. I thought, it feels good, right?

**Palmer Luckey** (0:32)
Oh, yeah. That's great.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:35)
Well, and we had this was like a felt like an emergency podcast. I was going to use that noise for the first time.

**Palmer Luckey** (0:43)
If you're going to do an emergency, you want to pull up the old air raid sirens.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:47)
I know. I didn't have a good one though. I need to download the extras somewhere. This is just what came with it.

**Palmer Luckey** (0:54)
You know, Cold War era air raid siren was my wake up alarm for many years as a teenager. Are you familiar with the whole air raid siren community?

**Ashlee Vance** (1:02)
No.

**Palmer Luckey** (1:03)
There's a lot of people who actually collect and restore old air raid sirens. So for a time, they were in every American town. So every town had one. And then they were slowly decommissioned over time. They shifted over to more electronic systems. A lot of these old sirens, they were actually engine driven, if you can believe that. They weren't electrical at all. And so you'd have a big Chrysler or a big Ford engine hooked up to this siren mechanism. You would either have a static air raid siren mounted on a roof, and people could usually get them for free if they would just remove them, or you'd have them on trailers. So there's a whole niche community now of people who collect Chrysler, Ford, and GM powered air raid sirens and run them at events. They get together and all run them together. I've pondered getting into that universe myself, but I'm too busy.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:48)
How do you, I mean, you know something about everything. Like when did you, when did you?

**Palmer Luckey** (1:53)
I got into air raid sirens because I was interested in extreme high power audio and all the speaker is is moving air. And it turns out that the way that we've done it with very high fidelity using electrical impulses to move a coil back and forth, to move a cone back and forth, that's actually a pretty limited way to do things. And so I then got into people who are building rotary vane subwoofers, basically, imagine like a helicopter rotor. But instead of being designed to lift something and move thrust around, it's just designed to move enormous amounts of air at a certain frequency to give you tons of bass. And that was when I found out about the principles of some of these old air raid sirens. It's actually very, very related. And so it turns out if you want to turn energy into sound, you probably do it mechanically, not electrically. And so that was, I just did, I ended up learning a lot about air raid sirens in the researching of extreme high-powered audio. The thing I was specifically interested in was building counter-UAS systems for this. So building, I wanted to build a system that could shake the inertial measurement unit of a drone at its own resonant frequency so as to make it stop working. And so the idea is with really loud sounds at just the right frequency, you can actually knock drones out of the sky by disabling their stability control. And it's since become a actually pretty well-developed technique. And the limitations are well understood, but people are doing it for real now.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:17)
OK. All right. So this was an Anduril day.

**Palmer Luckey** (3:19)
Oh, no. It was even pre-Anduril.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:21)
OK.

**Palmer Luckey** (3:22)
I mean, there was a bunch of stuff I was thinking about and working on even pre-Anduril that was related to defense. I never built any of this stuff, but I was just fascinated. It was very clear that drones were going to be a threat, even when I was just a kid. I remember reading some of the very first articles about quadcopters before there were any commercial quadcopters. I remember when the Parrot AR drone came out. That was, I believe, the first commercial quadcopter. I remember that. I was following that very, very closely. I strongly believed in the quadcopter architecture. The moment that they became commercial, it was clear that this was going to be a massive threat vector. I remember chatting in the ModRetro chat room with me and all my other teenage buddies, and maybe this is not a smart thing to say on a podcast, but I remember having a discussion with everybody that started with the prompt, how would you kill the president of the United States? And I knew what I would do. I would use drones. And you start to think, what are the countermeasures you could do? We're talking about, could you build air jets like compressed air tanks around the perimeter of a stage to deflect them? Could you build blast shields that pop up from a stage to protect the president? Well, wait a second. It turns out that protecting a president on a stage is not the extent of the problem. There's a lot of other times where he's in motion or unprotected. And even at the time, I knew that that was going to be a nearly impossible problem. And it's a miracle we haven't seen large scale drone attacks in the United States.